Forged

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Colossians has a different agenda and purpose from Ephesians. This author is especially concerned with a group of false teachers who are conveying some kind of “philosophy.” Unfortunately the author does not detail what this philosophy entailed and leaves only hints. Evidently the false teachers urged their listeners to worship angels and to follow Jewish laws about what to eat and what special days to keep as religious festivals. One reason the author does not explain in detail what these false teachers taught may be that the people reading the letter knew full well whom he had in mind and what they were saying.

  The author opposes them by emphasizing that Christ alone, not angelic beings, is a divinity worthy of worship and that his death put an end to the need to keep the law. In fact, for him, believers in Christ were already above all human rules and regulations, because they were already raised with Christ in the heavenly places, experiencing some kind of mystical unity with Christ in the here and now. This does not mean, however, that Christians could live just any way they please. They were still responsible for living moral lives. So the final two chapters outline some of the ethical requirements of the new life in Christ.

  The reasons for thinking the book was not actually written by Paul are much the same as for Ephesians. Among other things, the writing style and the contents of the book differ significantly from those in the undisputed letters of Paul. Far and away the most compelling study of the writing style of Colossians was done by the German scholar Walter Bujard nearly forty years ago now.23 Bujard analyzed all sorts of stylistic features of the letter: the kind and frequency of conjunctions, infinitives, participles, relative clauses, strings of genitives, and scores of other things. He was particularly interested in comparing Colossians to Paul’s letters that were similar in length: Galatians, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The differences between this letter and Paul’s writings are striking and compelling. Just to give you a taste:

  How often the letter uses “adversative conjunctions” (e.g., “although”): Galatians, 84 times; Philippians, 52; 1 Thessalonians, 29; Colossians, only 8.

  How often the letter uses causal conjunctions (e.g., “because”): Galatians, 45 times; Philippians, 20; 1 Thessalonians, 31; Colossians, only 9.

  How often the letter uses a conjunction (e.g., “that,” “as”) to introduce a statement: Galatians, 20 times; Philippians, 19; 1 Thessalonians, 11; Colossians, only 3.

  The lists go on for many pages, looking at all sorts of information, with innumerable considerations all pointing in the same direction: this is someone with a different writing style from Paul’s.

  And here again, the content of what the author says stands at odds with Paul’s own thought, but is in line with Ephesians. Here too, for example, the author indicates that Christians have already been “raised with Christ” when they were baptized, despite Paul’s insistence that the believers’ resurrection was future, not past (see Col. 2:12–13).

  What we have here, then, is another instance in which a later follower of Paul was concerned to address a situation in his own day and did so by assuming the mantle and taking the name of Paul, forging a letter in his name.

  Conclusion

  WE HAVE SEEN THAT there were a number of Pauline forgeries floating around in the early church, letters claiming to be written by Paul, but in fact written by someone else. Some of these letters are acknowledged as forgeries by everyone on the planet, such as the Letters of Paul and Seneca, for example. Others are a matter of serious scholarly discussion. But the majority of scholars acknowledge that, whereas there are seven letters in the New Testament that Paul certainly wrote, six others are probably (or for some scholars, certainly) not by Paul, for some of the reasons I have laid out here. There are plenty more reasons, but the arguments can get a bit dull after a while.

  Some scholars, though, have been reluctant to call these deutero-Pauline letters forgeries. Some have argued that they differ from Paul’s own letters, because they were given by Paul to a secretary to write, who used a different writing style from Paul’s. Others have suggested that since Paul in some of his letters mentions coauthors, possibly these other authors were responsible for writing the letters, accounting for their differences. And yet others have claimed that it was common in philosophical schools for disciples of a teacher to write treatises and sign them in the name of their teacher, as an act of humility, since all the ideas originated with the teacher himself.

  These are all interesting proposals. But I think they are all wrong. I try to show why in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alternatives to Lies and Deceptions

  WHEN I WAS A GOOD conservative evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute in my late teen years, I knew for a fact that there could not be any forgeries in the New Testament. My view of Scripture was deeply rooted in Scripture itself and above all in that classic statement of the Bible’s own inspiration, 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is inspired by God [literally, is God-breathed] and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” If Scripture is “breathed out,” or inspired, by God, then it obviously cannot have anything wrong in it, let alone anything approaching a lie. In no small measure that is because God himself, who breathed forth the text, does not lie.

  For this, we knew all the key verses, including the following:

  God is not a human being, that he should lie. (Num. 23:19)

  The Glory of Israel [i.e., God] will not deceive. (1 Sam. 15:29)

  In hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised…(Titus 1:2)

  He guaranteed it by an oath, so that by two unchangeable matters, in which God cannot lie…(Heb. 6:18)

  Scripture says that it is inspired or breathed out by God. God does not and cannot lie. Therefore Scripture does not and cannot contain lies. Forgery, on the other hand, involves lying. For that reason there can be no forgeries in the Bible.1

  This conservative evangelical view is still very much held by some scholars today, at least by conservative evangelical scholars. But I should emphasize it is a view that is built on theological premises of what has to be true, not on the grounds of what actually is true.2 For conservative evangelicals, the Bible has to be without mistake, error, or lie. And if it has to be that way, well then, it is that way!

  Can the Bible Contain Lies?

  I OBVIOUSLY CHANGED MY view on the matter. Three years after I graduated from Moody, I was studying in a master’s program at Princeton Theological Seminary, a mainline Presbyterian school that stresses critical scholarship more than uncritical dogmatism. It was at Princeton Seminary that I came to think that I had previously been approaching the Bible in precisely the wrong way. As a conservative evangelical I had come to the Bible assuming certain things about it even before reading it. I claimed it couldn’t have mistakes. And if it couldn’t have mistakes, then it obviously didn’t have mistakes. Anything that looked like a mistake, therefore, couldn’t really be a mistake, because the Bible couldn’t have mistakes. And how did I know that the Bible couldn’t have mistakes? Not on the basis of any examination or investigation of the Bible, but simply on the basis of what other people had told me, backed up by a few proof texts. I brought the belief in an error-free text to the Bible, and so naturally I found no mistakes, because there couldn’t be any.

  But why should I have believed this view was true? There were plenty of other Christians who believed other things, especially at a place like Princeton Theological Seminary. It was there that I realized that since the Bible is a book, it makes better sense to approach it the way one approaches books. There are certainly books in the world that don’t have any mistakes in them. But no one would insist that a particular phone book, chemistry textbook, or car instruction manual has absolutely no mistakes in it before reading it to see whether it does or not. Rather than thinking that the Bible cannot have mistakes, before looking to see if it does, why not see if it does, and only then decide whether it could?

 
I know that many evangelical Christians think that this is backwards and wrong, that questioning the Bible is questioning God. But I don’t see it that way. If God created an error-free book, then the book should be without errors. If what we have is not an error-free book, then it is not a book that God has delivered to us without errors.

  Moreover, as I studied the Bible I began to see the errors, here and there. And then they started to multiply. And eventually they came to involve not just little details, but very big questions and issues of real importance. I came away convinced that the Bible, whatever else it might be, is a very human book.

  Human books from the ancient world sometimes contained forgeries, writings that claim to be authored by someone who did not write them. This is certainly true of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. The book of Daniel claims to be written, in part, by the prophet Daniel during the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE. But there is no way it was written then. Scholars for over a hundred years have shown clear and compelling reasons for thinking that it was written four hundred years later, in the second century BCE, by someone falsely claiming to be Daniel. So too the book of Ecclesiastes. The author of this book does not come out and say his name is Solomon, but he does say that he is the son of David, who is the king in Jerusalem, and that he is fantastically rich and wise. In other words, he is claiming to be Solomon without using his name. But there is no way he was Solomon. This book could not have been written until six hundred years after Solomon’s death, as critical biblical scholars today agree.3

  Whereas there are a couple of forgeries in the Old Testament, there are numerous instances in the New Testament. So far we have considered two books that falsely claim to have been written by Peter and six that falsely claim to have been written by Paul. It is a striking phenomenon that even though scholars far and wide agree that these books were not actually written by their alleged authors, many scholars are reluctant to call the books what they are: literary forgeries meant to deceive their readers. Sometimes I think it is a bit strange that when some scholars refer to books with false authorial claims outside the New Testament, they have no qualms calling them “forgeries,” but when they refer to such books within the New Testament, they call them “pseudepigrapha.” Maybe it is better to use the more antiseptic, technical term when dealing with the Bible? Or maybe, instead, it is better to call a spade a spade. We are dealing with precisely the same phenomenon whether a book came to be included in the canon or not.

  In this chapter I deal with the ways some scholars have tried to get around the problem that the New Testament contains forgeries. Sometimes they do so with explanations that have become extremely common and widespread, so much so that they sound like common sense to some people. Among other things, it is widely claimed that the practice of making false authorial claims was acceptable in philosophical schools in antiquity and so was excusable for a follower of Peter or Paul. Or it is stated that allegedly pseudepigraphal letters can be explained by thinking that Peter and Paul used secretaries to produce these writings. As we will see, there is very little evidence to support either view.4 Before dealing with such explanations, I need to address another point of view often asserted by scholars, that ancient authors who assumed a false identity were not actually trying to be deceitful.

  Is Forgery Deceitful?

  A MISTAKEN SCHOLARLY COMMONPLACE

  A surprising number of scholars have claimed that even though the Bible may contain forgeries, these forgeries were never meant to deceive anyone. According to this view, ancient authors who assumed a false name were not trying to lead their readers astray. They were not lying, they were not being deceitful, and they were not condemned.

  It is hard to understand how anyone who has actually read any of the ancient discussions of forgery can make such claims. But this view is so widespread that it has become a complete commonplace in New Testament scholarship. Let me give several examples of scholars who make statements of this sort, along with some interspersed comments, before emphasizing just how wrong this view is.

  One highly respected author of the 1920s, in a classical study of the pastoral letters, claimed that the author, who called himself Paul even though he was someone else, “was not conscious of misrepresenting the Apostle in any way; he was not consciously deceiving anybody; it is not, indeed, necessary to suppose that he did deceive anybody.”5 What evidence does this scholar provide for these claims? None at all. And what a remarkable statement! If the author did not want to deceive anyone and in fact did not deceive anybody, why is it that every known interpreter of these letters for over seventeen hundred years was deceived, as many continue to be today, when they assume that the author who claims to be Paul really was Paul?

  Or consider the statement of an author from the 1970s who tells us: “Pseudonymity was a frequent feature in early literature. There was nothing immoral about it; it was simply the equivalent of modern anonymity. It was a mark of humility; the author, being too diffident to write under his own name, took shelter under a better-known name.”6 This author is at least right about one thing: forgery is frequent in ancient literature. But is it like “modern anonymity”? This is a rather odd thing to say about the practice. Why not say it is like “ancient” anonymity? Books were written anonymously in the ancient world as well as in the modern one, more often in fact. But this raises an enormous question that this scholar can’t answer. If an author who was writing out of humility did not want to mention his own name, why didn’t he simply write anonymously? Why did he attach a false name to his work, misrepresenting himself as someone else?

  Or take this comment from a scholar writing in the 1990s about the pseudonymous authorship of 2 Thessalonians: “This kind of pseudonymity should not be labeled as ‘forgery.’ This latter qualification implies a negative moral judgment, and we shall see that in all probability the author of 2 Thessalonians, and the authors of comparable pseudonymous documents, did not consider their writings as products of fraud. We should try to assess such writings by the standards that were accepted in the environment in which they originated.”7 This sounds like a sensible approach indeed, to evaluate the writings by ancient rather than modern standards. But this scholar never does so. He never looks at what ancient people called this practice or considers what they had to say about it. It is important to remember what ancient people called “this kind of pseudonymity”—they called books like this “falsely inscribed writings,” “lies,” and “bastards”!

  Representative of this same line of thought is the work of a recent scholar who is dealing with the fact that the author of Ephesians falsely claimed to be Paul. This scholar states that such a false claim “was a widespread and accepted literary practice in both Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures…. There is no reason to think of the device of pseudonymity in negative terms and to associate it necessarily with such notions as forgery and deception.”8 Once again, critical readers want to know what evidence the author cites that the practice was “accepted” and that it was not associated with “forgery and deception.” But he cites none. Why? Either because the author—even though he’s an otherwise reputable New Testament scholar—is not familiar with what ancient people actually said about forgery or because he doesn’t dare cite what they said, since what they said runs counter to what he says.

  Other scholars have allowed their theological views to cloud their historical judgment. Consider one of the most recent commentators on Colossians, who sees the work as a forgery, but maintains it is an “honest forgery” (as opposed to a dishonest one):

  The evidence from the ancient world makes it necessary to distinguish dishonest forgery, undertaken for nefarious and malicious ends, and what might be described, paradoxical as it may appear, as honest forgery…. It should be emphasized once again that the last option [that Colossians was not written by Paul] does not necessarily carry with it the stigma of fraud or forgery. That might apply in the case of a work written to propound some heretical doctrine, a
nd as noted above many such works were later to be stigmatized as apocryphal or heretical, and therefore rejected. In the case of New Testament pseudepigrapha, however, the situation is somewhat different: these works came to be recognized by the Church as valid and authentic witnesses to the genuine Christian faith…. They witness to what the Church believed.9

  In other words, if later, second-, third-, or fourth-century orthodox Christians agreed with the views found in the book of Colossians and decided that it should be included in the Bible, then its author was an honest forger. Other authors, however, who espoused views that later Christians rejected, were dishonest forgers. And how would the authors themselves know that centuries later their views would be accepted or not? Well, obviously, they’d have no way of knowing. So their honesty or dishonesty is rooted in circumstances completely outside of their own control.10

  AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE

  All of the scholars I have just quoted have three things in common. All of them maintain that what I’m calling forgery—the claim of an author to be someone other than who he really is—was not a deceptive practice; all of them base their views on statements to that effect by earlier scholars rather than on an examination of the ancient sources; and all of them choose not to provide a single stitch of evidence.

  That these views are wrong should be clear even from my brief examination of the ancient evidence in Chapter 1. If forgery was never thought of as wrong, why is it that in every known instance of a person being caught he is either reprimanded, abused, or punished? And if the purpose was not to deceive readers, what exactly was the purpose?